Sir George Young for Speaker

The real star of today's PMQs was Sir George Young, the gangling, benign, courteous baronet who sits for a beautiful stretch of Hampshire downland.

Sir George asked Gordon Brown how he could square his promise to rebalance the relationship between the Executive and the Legislature with the fact that Parliament will sit for fewer days in the next session than at any time since the Second World War. There was no good answer to his question, and the Broon stammered haplessly.

In The Plan, Douglas Carswell and I set out a series of measures that would tilt the balance: making appointments through open hearings rather than prime ministerial patronage, scrapping the Crown Executive powers, reducing the number of ministers, electing MPs through open primaries.

One important step would be to have a Speaker who embodied the dignity and supremacy of the House of Commons. A Speaker who, to take just one example, would occasionally tell ministers to answer questions honestly, rather than just ticking off MPs when they asked them too robustly. A Speaker who would make use of his power to order office-holders to come before Parliament and account for themselves. A Speaker who saw himself as a check on the government, not its agent in the chamber. My candidate? Sir George Young.